Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese: An Incremental Grammar Perspective

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 104–113 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Tohru Seraku Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese: An Incremental Grammar Perspective Tohru Seraku Hankuk University of Foreign Studies seraku@hufs.ac.kr Abstract This article defends an “incremental grammar” view, where syntactic puzzles are accounted for in terms of how a sentence is parsed online. To this end, we focus on the Multiple Nominative Construction (MNC) in Japanese, offering new data involving “rightward displacements.” The displacement patterns of nominative NPs are shown to follow from the way an MNC string is parsed left-to-right. Our incremental account is formalised in Dynamic Syntax, with the upshot that only the licit ordering of nominative NPs in MNC leads to a legitimate structure update. 1 Introduction Japanese allows Multiple Nominative Construction (MNC), where more than one NP is nominative- marked within a (seemingly) single clause (Kuno, 1973; see also references in §2.3). (1) Ken-ga kami-ga nagai K-NOM hair-NOM long ‘Ken’s hair is long.’ In (1), both Ken and kami ‘hair’ are marked by the nominative case particle ga. The initial ga-marked element Ken in (1) is often called “major subject” (Kuroda, 1978; 1986; 1988).1 In this article, we provide new data on MNC in connection with rightward displacements (§2), and argue that these data are adequately handled from 1 A major subject is generally in focus, giving rise to an “exhaustive listing” reading (Kuno, 1973). Thus, a more appropriate translation of (1) would be ‘It is Ken whose hair is long.’ See Heycock and Doron (2003: §4) for an explanation of why a major subject generally (but not always) endangers an exhaustive interpretation. the perspective of “incremental grammar,” a view where syntactic puzzles are solved as a reflection of the way a sentence is parsed time-linearly (§3). Our analysis is formalised within Dynamic Syntax (Cann et al, 2005), with the bonus of predicting the “left-right asymmetries” (§4). 2 Empirical Findings 2.1 Domain of Enquiry We begin by clarifying our target. In Japanese, an object NP is typically accusative-marked, but some stative predicates may select a nominative-marked object NP (Koizumi, 2008; Kuno, 1973; 1983). (2) Ken-ga eigo-ga hanas-eru K-NOM English-NOM speak-POT ‘Ken can speak English.’ This article does not analyse MNC data such as (2) which involve a nominative-marked object. In generative syntax, some scholars have argued that MNC (1) is derived from (3). (3) Ken-no kami-ga nagai K-GEN hair-NOM long ‘Ken’s hair is long.’ In Kuno (1973), “subjectivization” applies to the genitive-marked NP Ken-no, which turns it to the nominative-marked subject NP Ken-ga. Analyses along with these lines include “nominativization” (Shibatani, 1977), “possessor raising” (Ura, 1996), and “genitive raising” (Tateishi, 1991). The type of MNC sentences such as (1), which is related to “genitive”-involving sentences like (3), has been studied most extensively. Since the other kinds of MNC have distinct syntactic and semantic properties (Kikuchi, 1996; Kobayashi, 2010), we focus on the type of MNC illustrated in (1). 104 It is further noted that more than …

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